Many applications require the use of coils of conductive wire, ribbon or tape to be wound around various shaped objects and/or in various shaped patterns. Some of these applications, such as the stator and rotor windings of normal DC motors, require very little precision in the placement of the winding turns and hence many high speed methods are capable of performing this type of coil winding. Other applications, such as the windings for superconducting magnets, require much greater precision in wire placement and winding methods in order to extract peak performance from any particular winding configuration.
The magnetic field strength generated by such magnets is directly related to the current densities that can be handled by the windings. Current density is directly related to the amount of space left between coil conductors after the coil has been wound. It is therefore important that any winding method used with such superconducting magnet coils produce coils with zero interconductor spacing (i.e. each conductor in the coil touches its neighbors). Such a winding is known as an ordered winding. Such tight packing of the coil conductors reduce the amount of movement of the conductors after the coil has been wound (such as when the magnet is brought to the very low temperatures at which the superconducting magnets operate). Such movement of the conductors would disrupt the magnetic field.
Prior art techniques for producing ordered wound coils require very costly tooling for each winding pattern. This requires very large sums of money to be expended for research and development of new coil designs, as well as a large capital expenditure for each coil design required. Once a coil design is tooled for production, the design cannot be changed without retooling.
Furthermore, superconductor wires, such as niobium titanium within a copper billet, are brittle. Prior art winding techniques impart residual stresses into the windings which accumulate as more turns are added to the winding. These residual winding stresses can act to damage the superconductor wires used in the windings, decreasing the magnet's performance.
There is therefore a need in the prior an for a method to produce ordered wound coils without the need for retooling the device for different coil designs. There is also a need for a method to produce ordered wound coils without producing residual winding stresses in the coil conductors. The present invention is directed toward meeting these needs.